Deleting Dataless Local Snapshot

Question

When opening my MacBook (10.13) this morning, it immediately froze and didn’t respond for about 20 minutes. After shutting it off and attempting to reboot, the load bar appeared, filled, but then hung and the login screen never appeared. I shut down and tried to reboot to Safe Mode, but had the same result. In looking for solutions, I noticed something about dataless snapshots (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8092082), and that I was receiving the same error message from Disk Utility as in that forum. So I booted into Recovery Mode. After calling tmutil listlocalsnapshots /, I saw that I do have a dataless snapshot. However, I can’t delete the snapshot in Recovery Mode (that gives a “failed to delete” error). I’ve also attempted to do a full restore from Time Machine, but this also hung. In regards to my drive failing, I suppose it’s possible that it’s dying, but I had a new SSD installed about 18 months ago and have had no problems since, so I’d doubt that’s the problem. Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

May be, if your Mac is à 13" 2012 non retina model, the hard drive cable is broken. It's a common problem on this models.

To verify, you can try this : you extract the SSD from the Mac and put it in a external USB enclosure. Then you reboot the Mac on this external enclosure (press Option key). If the Mac boot correctly you have to change this cable. You can find here the tutorial : https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Unibody+Mid+2012+Hard+Drive+Cable+Replacement/10379#